Many college students adjust to leaving their family and friends from home once they are heading into their junior year of college. Whether they are far or just few minutes away from home, that fear of adjustment that was faced freshman year is almost minuscule now. For those who study abroad, that fear slowly creeps up again. There is a rush of excitement yet also anxiety of the unknown.

I am exactly one week away from leaving my house in Naples, Florida to drive to the airport in Tampa. It is almost a numbing feeling from the intense excitement from embarking on a new adventure but it is also mixed with the sadness and also anxiety of leaving my family and boyfriend behind. I think going into a new environment blindly is an interesting conundrum. I have spent most of my summer enjoying the time that I have with my loved ones, leaving little room for myself to pack and prepare for my upcoming trip to Denmark. It is almost a balancing act, giving the emotional support to your loved ones before your long absence while trying to find the time to support your own worries about going to a new place. Since receiving my housing location, I have been googling everything that I should possibly know about Copenhagen; my host family even gave me a short documentary to watch on Denmark to catch me up. It is a strange feeling to be transitioning from such a stark end filled with commitments and worries while preparing for also a definite new beginning.

I am the kind of person who adapts easily to new situations. Stress does not tend to keep me up at night but the same thoughts have been running through my head since I got accepted to DIS. I don’t know how far I can expand the money that I have. I wonder if I will have the same social life I have at my home university given my host family is an hour train ride away from my classes. On the other hand, having a host family gives me the opportunity for the cultural immersion that I long for. As an anthropology major, my professors always say that becoming one with a society is the only way to truly understand one. Living like a local and letting go of my “American-ness” is something that I hope to do when I am in Denmark. I want to be able to embrace minimalism (although my suitcase is not exactly showing that) and I want to let go of technology, only focusing on the present moment. My program is taking me to Amsterdam for a week, and one of my courses on the Holocaust is taking me to Hamburg. I want to explore and be immersed into each place I go, learning as much history and culture that I can take in. Also being Jewish, going to the concentration camps in Hamburg will be a humbling experience for me. It is one thing to learn about the horrors that were faced by Jews, LGBTQ+, gypsies, among others, but it is another to actually see where these events took place.

Coming to Denmark allows me the opportunity to focus on myself and my future. I learned about DIS through a simple Google search, as I was searching for a program focused on sex trafficking. At my home university, I volunteer at a coffee shop that donates 100% of its proceeds to anti-human trafficking campaigns. Through my involvement at the cafe, and my anthropology classes always having us draw our focus on to a single topic, I started to watch video after video and read article after article about human trafficking. The spring of my sophomore year I embarked on a research project with one of my professors who specializes in Southeast Asian studies. The research began as looking at the micro-loan system in India and turned into researching the monetary value of human and sex trafficking in Southeast Asia, primarily in Cambodia and Vietnam. My studies at DIS will allow me to the opportunity for a hands-on application to a field that I want to advocate for in the future. Although my passion towards this field is strong, the emotional side of it is something that often worries me. Whenever one is dealing with humans, it takes a different level of learned ethics and emotional stability to deal well with these topics. I always need to remind myself that taking a mental break from some of the negatives of the trafficking industry is necessary.

The closer I get to August 17th, the more excited I feel about making this transition abroad. I am coming with no expectations, I want to experience my time there without judgment and I hope I come out as a better person. I think self-growth is an important goal, no matter what your life path is.

Until next time, see you in Copenhagen!